This family experienced just one of the happy endings at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. Its missing persons table is operated by Houston Police and the Texas Center for the Missing, a nonprofit. Officials said that 71 percent of the missing persons cases there were resolved as of Thursday.

Another of those tearful reunions? Kara Flores and her brother, who has schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. He had been missing since the beginning of the storm.

"My parents are sick with grief because he's the baby," she said. "I thought, 'It's a long shot. There's no way I'm going to find him.'"

But a neighbor saw him in a background of a news report at the convention center, so she made her way there, and the missing persons table got them connected.